Ken McClure - Wildcard

‘Nothing to do with her heart,’ said Steven.

‘Thank God for that,’ said Sykes-Taylor.

The milk of human kindness is not strained, thought Steven. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven…

He drove back from Hull feeling thoroughly depressed. He had felt sure when he set off that morning that this would be the day when he made definite progress but now here he was, driving back through the rain with an apparently insoluble puzzle for company instead of an answer.

As he entered the outskirts of Manchester and headed towards the city centre he saw newspaper stands featuring the word ‘Disaster’ prominently as the ‘hook’ on their advertising hoardings. Intrigued, he stopped and bought a paper, only to find that the story was the commercial disaster of Manchester’s Christmas. City stores’ takings were down by more than 60 per cent on the previous year. Fear was keeping people away from the shops. Good, he thought. Let’s have an old-fashioned Christmas, folks — just like the ones we used to know.

There hadn’t been time the previous evening to go through all the new material from Sci-Med on the wildcard patients, so Steven applied himself to it as soon as he got in. There was a lot on Humphrey Barclay, ranging from school reports to his dental records. He had been fined twice for speeding over the last ten years, and had spent three days in hospital in 1997, having a wisdom tooth removed.

This last piece of information reminded Steven of something in the original Sci-Med file about Barclay having been ill more recently, that being the reason for his poor rating at annual appraisal time. He looked out the file and found that Barclay had undergone heart surgery in the early part of the current year. Like Sister Mary’s operation, it had been straightforward and he had made a full recovery. No further details were available.

Steven’s satisfaction at having found some common factor, however tenuous, between two of the wildcards was greatly tempered by the fact that it hardly seemed relevant. Both Barclay and Mary Xavier had undergone successful surgery in the past year and both had made a full recovery. So what? Almost half-heartedly he thought he’d better check Ann Danby’s file and, to his no great surprise, he found no mention of surgery in her medical records, and the record seemed complete.

He was about to dismiss the surgery angle as mere coincidence when he reminded himself that Ann Danby’s status had changed. She was no longer a wildcard: she was a contact, because she had contracted the disease from Victor Spicer. Spicer was the real wildcard in the Manchester pack: it was Spicer’s medical records he should be looking at, and they were not yet available. The same applied to Frank McDougal. Steven contacted Sci-Med and asked for more details on Barclay’s illness and also for McDougal’s medical history. As for Spicer, he would go and see his wife, and find out for himself.

As he drove through the city, Steven was struck by how quiet it was. It was just after seven in the evening but it felt more like three in the morning. It was unusually dark. Many neon signs had been switched off because the premises they advertised were closed until further notice or FOR THE DURATION OF THE EMERGENCY, as the signs outside said. Pubs remained open at the licensee’s discretion, as did off-licences, the authorities having decided that closing them would be tantamount to prohibition, a measure not noted for its success in the past. Buses still ran, but on a reduced service schedule, and the night service had been abandoned altogether.

On his way to Spicer’s house, Steven came across three ambulances, blue lights flashing as they ferried patients across town, but there was no call for their sirens in the light traffic. Their silence added to the air of surrealism. Thinking about their destination made Steven wonder if Caroline would be working at St Jude’s this evening. He resolved to drive down there after he had spoken to Matilda Spicer.

He was shocked at her appearance when she opened the door. She was no longer the confident political wife with the ready smile and charm to spare. He had been wrong to categorise her as a traditional, stoic Tory wife, for in her place stood a pale, haggard figure with a haunted look that suggested she hadn’t slept properly for some time.

‘You!’ she exclaimed when she saw Steven. ‘Just what the hell do you want?’

‘I’m sorry. I hate to trouble you, but I need some more information about your husband, Mrs Spicer,’ said Steven.

‘Then why are you asking me?’ she snapped. ‘What the hell do I know about him? I seem to be the last person on earth to know what he gets up to.’

‘I’m sorry. I know this can’t be easy for you.’

‘Easy for me!’ she repeated. ‘Can you even begin to imagine what all this is doing to my daughter and me? We’ve lost everything, absolutely everything. You appear on the scene and, abracadabra, our life disappears in a puff of smoke. I don’t have a husband; Zoe no longer has a father; the charities I worked for don’t want to know me; even the au pair has been taken away by the agency — apparently we’re no longer a suitable placement for her.’

‘I’m sorry,’ repeated Steven. ‘I assumed that friends and family would rally round at a time like this.’

‘Oh, they are,’ sneered Matilda. ‘They’re rallying round him. Victor’s father more or less suggested that the whole thing was my fault. If I’d been a better wife, his precious son wouldn’t have needed to look elsewhere — that’s more or less how he put it.’

‘Like father like son,’ said Steven with distaste.

‘Well, what did you want to ask me?’

‘I need to know if your husband underwent surgery in the last year or so,’ said Steven.

‘Yes, he did,’ replied Matilda, making an obvious effort to pull herself together. ‘He had a heart operation last February.’

‘Successful?’

‘Unfortunately, yes.’

‘Can I ask where the surgery was carried out?’

‘He had it done in London.’

‘Privately?’

Matilda named a well-known private hospital. ‘We have insurance,’ she added.

‘Of course,’ said Steven.

‘Now, if there’s nothing else, I really must be getting on… I have to prepare for Christmas,’ she said with a look that challenged Steven to imagine what her Christmas was going to be like, and implied that it was all his fault.

Steven thanked her politely for her help and wished her well, although it sounded hollow in the circumstances. Matilda, who had shown no interest in why he had asked his questions, gave a half-smile tinged with sadness and regret and closed the door.

Steven heard the strains of ‘Claire de lune’ begin haltingly on the piano as he walked back to the car. He glanced back at the house and, through the branches of the half-decorated Christmas tree in the window, saw Zoe Spicer sitting on the edge of the piano stool, concentrating on her music while her mother, standing behind her, looked on.

The scene made him reflect on just how suddenly disaster could strike. Matilda Spicer must have seen herself as comfortable, confident and secure. She might even have imagined herself as a government minister’s wife in some future administration. Then suddenly, as she had said, abracadabra! None of it was there any more. The ball bounces, the cookie crumbles, shit happens and you’re left with… zilch.

Three wildcards and three heart operations was the thought uppermost in Steven’s mind as he drove back to his hotel. The coincidence had just got bigger, but on the downside it still seemed irrelevant when it came to understanding how these people got the virus. The fact that they had all undergone surgery — and successful surgery at that — was the only thing they had in common. As for the surgery itself, it had been carried out in different hospitals and in different parts of the country by different surgeons at different times. Taken at face value, this might suggest that people who had undergone surgery were more susceptible to infection, but that didn’t help at all in establishing where the infection had come from. There had to be another linking factor.